As a founding member of the '70s minimalist ensemble Kraftwerk, Karl Bartos helped develop much of what is taken for granted in popular electronic music, including nonhuman singing talent.

Two decades later, Bartos and partner Lothar Manteuffel have formed Elektric Music to experiment with new ways to make the computer sing. For starters, they've sampled and digitized human speech to create a library of phonemes, the building blocks of speech. Bartos explains: "If you sample phonemes, you can paste them together in odd ways."

Even with recent advances in speech-synthesis technology, Bartos says getting computers to sing "is a time-eating process and has nothing to do with rock and roll. You sit in front of the computer engaging in trial and error. Perhaps it's easier to just boogie down."